Second trip to Ba Vi

This weekend, my translators and I took a second trip to Ba Vi, where we conducted five additional interviews (we’re now up to 46!). This trip was a lot more hectic than the first one, but was overall very successful and we learned a lot.

We met at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning at RMIT, an Australian university in Hanoi that Linh, one of my translators, attends. It only takes a little over an hour to get to Ba Vi (60 km away) because Linh and Tung have discovered a very quick route on a major highway that is populated by lots of large trucks. Although the weather in Hanoi central was fairly dry when we left, out in Ba Vi it was wet and muddy – I was riding on the back of Tung’s motorbike, which meant that my entire back got covered in mud during the trip. We arrived at around 7:30 a.m. at the same hotel we stayed at during our first trip, and the woman who runs the hotel was happy to see us despite the mud tracks we left as we walked upstairs to our rooms.

We realized soon after we arrived that there was no way motorbikes would be able to take us deep into the villages where our households were located. That meant we needed to hire some sort of car service, or wait until the next day to try to see if the weather improved. The staff at our hotel came through and helped us hire a car for the day for about $35 (750,000 VND). Yet the car was only able to take us part of the way for most of the houses, which meant a lot of trekking through the mud to get to some of the houses deep in the countryside (definitely brought back memories of treks in Sapa). Day two, the weather was better and much of the mud had dried, so we were able to take our bikes to our only interview that day.

Nearly all of the parents (4/5) that we met with during this visit were fairly educated about HIV/AIDS – how it spreads, what people should do to avoid contracting it, etc. – and many of them were pro-integration of orphans into public schools. Yet 4 of the parents also brought up fear of HIV infection when children are playing with each other at school. One parent said that the government should create a separate school for the orphans (for both their sakes and for the sakes of non-infected children currently attending public schools, he said). On this trip, as on our previous one, oftentimes the whole family was present for the interview. And during one interview, a grandfather who was sitting on the bed nearby filmed part of our interview on his phone! 

Below are some pictures (from my phone, so unfortunately low quality) of our trip.

^This was one of the roads we walked on to get to a household.

^Tung and Linh walking to the house.

^Cows outside one of our participant's houses.

Peer Education workshop in Ho Chi Minh City

From Tuesday to Thursday of last week, my coworker at Save the Children and I took a work trip down to Ho Chi Minh City. The weather in the south was much warmer than in Hanoi, and even though I’d been there before I had forgotten how big Saigon is. Being the largest city in Vietnam, it is comprised of 19 inner districts and even more suburban ones. Our hotel and office were both in District 1, which struck me as being fairly touristy. Across the hall from us at our hotel was a Vietnamese family who now live in Georgia, and at breakfast I met a couple from Washington who were traveling around the country for a month.

After arriving Tuesday morning, I headed over to our office where my coworkers and I prepared for a workshop that afternoon with some secondary school students who are HIV/AIDS Peer Educators. The workshop was in a school in District 11, about 30 minutes away from the office by cab, and lasted for about three hours. The school where we held the session has had success integrating HIV-infected and affected students from a nearby shelter.

At the workshop, we first gave the children a pre-test to test their knowledge about how HIV/AIDS spreads and what does and does not put a person at risk of catching the virus. Then we asked them to draw and share first, a happy memory, and second, a sad one. After that we did a few activities that served to teach the students about the various ways that HIV can and cannot be transmitted (ex: kissing puts you at no risk; having sex does) and did an exercise where they looked at various pictures of children being out-casted from their friends or families, in an effort to open their eyes to the myriad of ways that stigma and discrimination can negatively impact children’s lives. The workshop also included an advocacy activity where students were assigned to teams that corresponded to various parts of society – government officials, teachers, neighbors, parents, etc. They brainstormed and came up with a list of things that each of these groups should be doing to help children with HIV/AIDS.

We found that these children, like the parents I've been interviewing, think HIV/AIDS can be transmitted while children are playing at school from cuts on the skin (this is actually something they are taught during some of their Peer Education trainings). At the end of the session, we did a question-and-answer session where we taught them that this is so unlikely that it has never happened before, and the post-tests confirmed that the children learned a great deal during those three hours. Below are some of the pictures I took during the session (from my phone so the resolution isn't great).

^The workshop's facilitator, Nghan, works with one of the groups during the Advocacy break-out session.

^One of the groups hard at work during the Advocacy activity. This group represented parents.

^Mai, my coworker (in the yellow top), leads a question-and-answer session with the students.

^These students represented neighbors during the Advocacy game.

When we weren't at work, we went to tons of coffee shops each night and managed to squeeze in some karaoke Saigon style before the trip was over. A few coworkers and I went to a retro cafe called Cafe Xom (right near our office) on the last night. The cafe was full of musicians who study or have already graduated from the HCMC Music Academy (not sure of the formal name); anyway, they played song after song in both English and Vietnamese, and I was blown away by how talented they all were. Before leaving, Mai (my coworker) and I met one of the most talented singers of them all, a man named Y-Rock who grew up in the highlands and now does nationwide singing fundraisers to raise money for his hometown (Check him out here: http://www.tagged.com/guitarist_rocky -- I am convinced that he is the Vietnamese version of James Franco). 

^Y-Rock is the guy in the gray tank top.